Poetry-Of-World-War-I.Pdf

“I. Peace” “III. The Dead” By Rupert Brooke Originally published in 1918. Excerpted from Rupert Brooke: The Collected Poems, fourth revised edition, 1987 “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” “Sonnet X” “Sonnet XI” By Alan Seeger Excerpted from Poems, 1916 “Strange Meeting” “Anthem for Doomed Youth” “Dulce Et Decorum Est” By Wilfred Owen Originally published in 1920. Excerpted from Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others, 1973 I have a rendezvous with “They” Death/ At some disputed “Counter-Attack” barricade,/ When Spring By Siegfried Sassoon comes back with rustling Originally published in 1918. Excerpted from Collected Poems, 1949 shade/ And apple- blossoms fill the air—/ I have a rendezvous with or the soldiers who went off to fight in World War I, litera- Death/ When Spring Fture was the main form of entertainment. “In 1914 there was virtually no cinema,” writes historian Paul Fussell in The brings back blue days Great War and Modern Memory ; there was no radio at all; and and fair. there was certainly no television. Fussell continues, “Amuse- From I Have A Rendezvous ment was largely found in language formally arranged, either with Death by Alan Seeger in books and periodicals or at the theater and music hall, or in one’s own or one’s friends’ anecdotes, rumors, or clever struc- turing of words.” For British soldiers in particular, writing poetry was one of the chief sources of pleasure. Britain formed its army with volunteers, and many of these volunteers came out of Great Britain’s high-quality public school system, the British equivalent of private preparatory high schools and col-

115 Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

English poet Rupert Brooke is perhaps the most famous of the patriotic poets, poets who celebrated England’s entry into World War I. Born on August 3, 1887, to a family of educators, Brooke excelled at school. He became part of a circle of poets at Cambridge University who rebelled against the poetry of their parents’ generation and hoped to create new verses that were realistic, bold, and vital. They were known as the Georgian poets. Brooke published his first collection of poems in 1911 and made his name by contributing to Georgian Poetry , a book containing selected works by different British poet Rupert Brooke. poets, published in 1912. (Corbis Corporation. Reproduced by permission.) Like many other educated young Englishmen, Brooke responded to the declaration of war in 1914 with patriotic became wildly popular in England. Brooke fervor. He had tired of “a world grown old never saw action in the war; he was on his and cold and weary” and hoped to find way to fight the Turks at Gallipoli when he glory in the war. His sonnets (fourteen-line contracted blood poisoning from an insect poems) about the thrill of going off to war bite on his lip. He died on the island of to fight for his country were published and Scyros in the Aegean Sea on April 23, 1915.

leges in the United States. Many British soldiers were therefore well-educated men who appreciated poetry.

British soldiers had a special relationship with literature. British schooling was based on the idea that understanding the poetry of the past makes people good citizens. Thus, all British students were familiar with a wide range of poets, from ancient Greek poets to those more recent, such as British writer Thomas Hardy. Many soldiers carried with them to the front a standard volume called the Oxford Book of English Verse , a collection of

116 World War I: Primary Sources important poetry; others had recent publications of poetry sent to them. Such books were extremely popular at the front, for they provided a diversion Alan Seeger (1888–1916) from the horror and tedium of war. The only major American war Fussell quotes the story of Herbert Read, poet, Alan Seeger was born in New York who was mailed a copy of a book of City in 1888. Seeger attended Harvard verse by poet Robert Browning: “At first College, where he dabbled in poetry and I was mocked in the dugout as a high- began to develop a reputation as a brow for reading The Ring and the Book, freethinker (someone who does not but saying nothing I waited until one of follow the conventions of his peers). After the scoffers idly picked it up. In ten min- graduation he returned to New York City, utes he was absorbed, and in three days but he grew to dislike life in America; he we were fighting for turns to read it, and felt that Americans were uncivilized and talking of nothing else at meals.” incapable of enjoying life’s true pleasures, Schooled in poetry, many such as fine wine, good food, and art. In British soldiers turned to writing 1912 Seeger moved to Paris, France. poetry to record their reactions to the When World War I began, Seeger war. And as it turned out, World War I leaped at the chance to enlist in the produced more poetry than any war French Foreign Legion, a division of the before or since. Hundreds of volumes French army that accepted enlistments of war poetry were published; accord- from foreigners. Seeger hoped to find in ing to John Lehmann, author of The war the intensity and excitement that he English Poets of the First World War, craved. Seeger served in the foreign “There was a period, during and legion for nearly two years, seeing action directly after the War, when almost in battles at Aisne and Champagne, but any young man who could express his he was bored whenever he was out of thoughts and feelings in verse could battle. He soothed his boredom in part find a publisher and a public.” Poets— by writing poems; his only collection of including Rupert Brooke, Siegfried poetry was published in 1916. On July 4, Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund 1916, Seeger took part in one of the Blunden, Alan Seeger (the rare Ameri- major battles of the war, the Battle of the can), Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Somme. Pushing forward on the first day and many others—recorded all the of the attack, he was gunned down by German machine-gun fire, crawled into a various ways that soldiers experienced shell hole, and died. the war, from the first longings for glory to the final sickening confronta- tion with death. Many of these poems are now forgotten, but many others— such as the ones included below—are still remembered and taught. These poems provide a fasci- nating view of the first modern war.

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 117 The poetry of World War I closely reflects the attitudes that many soldiers had toward the war. The first poems— including those by Brooke and Seeger—brim with the confi- dence of soldiers who believe that they are embarking on a glo- rious adventure. For the first year or two of the war, many poems spoke of honor, glory, and patriotism; they compared the duties of modern soldiers with those of warriors celebrated in the epic poems of the ancient Greeks. Yet the slowly dawn- ing horror of the continuing war began to reshape war poetry, just as it reshaped the attitudes of everyone involved in the war. As the war wore on, poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon began to write bitter, cutting verses about the horror of war and the failure of patriotic visions. After 1916, writes Lehmann, “the dreams were shattered, and patriotism became a matter of grim endurance against all odds, of despairing hope almost buried beneath the huge weight of disillusionment, of the need not to be defeated existing beside the belief that it was increasingly not merely stupid but almost criminal not to nego- tiate an end to the slaughter.”

Things to remember while reading the poems of hope and glory by Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger: • The poems by Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger hint at the attitudes poets had toward the war during the first period of war poetry, the period of hope and honor and glory. In these poems the poets speak of leaving the petty pleasures of civilian life for the exalted life of a soldier; they are romantic and hopeful. • Literature and warfare went hand in hand during World War I. Many of the war poets composed their poems while sitting in the trenches waiting for a battle to begin; novelists and essayists also composed their works under the most difficult conditions. Reading was a common way of passing long hours between battles. • Poetry can be difficult. Poets use uncommon and some- times old-fashioned words to convey their ideas; they often refer to ancient myths or to other poems that most people today do not know. Poets condense meaning into tight knots of words, and it can be difficult to untie those

118 World War I: Primary Sources knots. But the very things that make poetry difficult also make it rewarding. It may help to read the poems several times or to read them aloud. Think of a poem as a puzzle and see if you can solve it.

“I. Peace” By Rupert Brooke

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending, Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there But only agony, and that has ending; And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

“III. The Dead” By Rupert Brooke

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, Who has matched us with But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. His hour: Who has allowed us These laid the world away; poured out the red to be here at this important Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be moment in history. Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Naught: Nothing. Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Save: Except.

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 119 Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth , Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.

“I Have a Rendezvous with Death” By Alan Seeger

I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air— I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair. It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath— It may be I shall pass him still. I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow-flowers appear. God knows ‘twere better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath Where hushed awakenings are dear. . . But I’ve a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous. Dearth: Shortage of, lack.

Rendezvous: A prearranged meeting. “Sonnet X” By Alan Seeger Nigh: Near.

Baffling all pursuit: I have sought Happiness, but it has been Always out of reach. A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit,

120 World War I: Primary Sources And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit More fair of outward hue than sweet within. Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment Of battling hosts that conquer or recoil, There only, chastened by fatigue and toil, I knew what came the nearest to content. For there at least my troubled flesh was free From the gadfly Desire that plagued it so; Discord and Strife were what I used to know, Heartaches, deception, murderous jealousy; By War transported far from all of these, Amid the clash of arms I was at peace.

“Sonnet XI: On Returning to the Front After Leave” By Alan Seeger

Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed), Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue Look the leftovers of mankind that rest, Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you. A flake in the ferment / Of battling hosts that conquer War has its horrors, but has this of good— or recoil: As an individual That its sure processes sort out and bind soldier caught in a clash Brave hearts in one intrepid brotherhood between great nations, the And leave the shams and imbeciles behind. poet is comparing himself to a Now turn we joyful to the great attacks, flake—perhaps of snow— Not only that we face in a fair field caught in a ferment, or storm. Our valiant foe and all his deadly tools, But also that we turn disdainful backs Chastened : Subdued or worn out. On that poor world we scorn yet die to shield— That world of cowards, hypocrites, and fools. Apart: Apart from; other than.

Things to remember while reading the poems of disillusionment by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon: • The following five poems by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon take a very different view of war. These are poems

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 121 of harsh disillusionment. The authors seem to realize that there is no higher calling to war but merely a bitter struggle to survive. • Though the romantic and opti- mistic poems of Alan Seeger and Rupert Brooke were very popular early in the war, the work of Owen and Sassoon was much more popular late in the war and afterwards. The change reflected in these poems is said to mark the emer- gence of modern literature, which focuses more on the perceptions of common people than earlier literature does.

“Strange Meeting” Wilfred Owen. By Wilfred Owen (The Granger Collection. Reproduced by permission.) It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. Groined: Opened holes in. With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained; That vision’s face was Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, grained: The man’s face And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. was etched with pain. ‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’ Flues: Chimneys of ‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years, the tunnel. The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

122 World War I: Primary Sources Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)

Unlike poets Alan Seeger and shock (a term indicating that a soldier was Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen wrote not of so mentally distraught from fighting that the glory of war but of the pity of war. he could no longer serve). At the Owen was born in Oswestry, England, on Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, March 18, 1893, to a humble, religious Scotland, Owen met poet Siegfried family. Owen excelled at school and Sassoon. The two poets spurred each other eventually attended the University of on, and both created some of their London, but he was forced to leave the greatest works while at the hospital. university when he ran short of money. He Owen returned to active duty in worked for a time as a reverend’s assistant September 1918 and was soon sent to and as a schoolteacher, but he had not yet attack some of the Germans’ strongest found his calling when he decided to enroll defensive positions on the Hindenburg line in the English army in the summer of 1915. (a line of concrete-reinforced trenches built Owen served as an officer in the by the Germans). Owen earned a Military Second Battalion Manchester Regiment, Cross (war medal) for his efforts, but he was and he saw plenty of action. Leading a soon killed in a battle on November 4, regiment in a battle at Serre, he saw many 1918, one week before the end of the war. of his men killed and wounded. These Owen’s friends and admirers—including memories of battle would soon fuel an Sassoon—made sure that Owen’s poetry outpouring of poetry. In 1917 Owen was was published, and Owen is now considered hospitalized with a concussion and shell one of the greatest of the war poets.

Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled, Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 123 None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .’

“They” By Siegfried Sassoon

The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought In a just cause: they lead the last attack On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought New right to breed an honourable race, They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’ ‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply. ‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind; Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die; And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find Citadels: Fortresses. A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’ Taint: Any trace of discredit And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’ or dishonor.

Without stint: Without limit. Cess: Cessation, or end. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” Gone syphilitic: Caught a By Wilfred Owen venereal disease.

Passing-bells: Bells rung to What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? announce a death. —Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

124 World War I: Primary Sources Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, — The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

“Counter-Attack” By Siegfried Sassoon

We’d gained our first objective hours before While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes, Patter out their hasty Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke. orisons: Speak their funeral Things seemed all right at first. We held their line, prayers. With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed, Shires: English country And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench. villages. The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps; Pallor: Paleness. And trunks, face downward in the sucking mud, Pall: Coffin. Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled; Pallid: Lacking color or And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, liveliness. Bulged, clotted heads, slept in the plastering slime. And then the rain began—the jolly old rain! Posted: In position. A yawning soldier knelt against the bank, Grovelled: Crawled. Staring across the morning blear with fog; Saps: Covered trenches. He wondered when the Allemands would get busy; Blear: Blurred, dimmed. And then, of course, they started with five-nines Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud. Allemands: Germans. Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Five-nines: Explosive shells. Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, Posturing giants: The poet is While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. probably referring to the He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, towers of smoke and dust that Sick for escape—loathing the strangled horror rise from shell blasts and are And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. blown apart by the wind.

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 125 An officer came blundering down the trench: ‘Stand-to and man the fire-step!’ On he went. . . Gasping and bawling, ‘Fire-step . . . counter-attack!’ Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left; And stumbling figures looming out in front. ‘O Christ, they’re coming at us!’ Bullets spat, And he remembered his rifle . . . rapid fire . . . And started blazing wildly . . . then a bang Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans. . . Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

Fire-step: The top step of “Dulce Et Decorum Est” a trench. By Wilfred Owen Knock-kneed: Literally, an Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, inward curvature of the legs, but here the poet is referring Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through to legs bowed by the weight sludge, of a load. Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. We turned our backs: Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots Retreated. But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Blood-shod: Wearing blood Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots for shoes; soldiers often lost Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. their boots and were forced to march barefoot, cutting their feet. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling, Five-Nines: Explosive shells. Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, Clumsy helmets: Gas masks. And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . . . Misty panes and thick green Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, light: The poet is referring to As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. the experience of looking through the thick, foggy In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, lenses of gas masks into the He plunges at me, guttering , choking, drowning. green fog of poison gas. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Guttering: In a sorry or Behind the wagon that we flung him in, degraded state. And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

126 World War I: Primary Sources British troops blinded by mustard gas in a German gas attack at Bethune, France, April 1918. (Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission.)

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 127 Froth-corrupted lungs: His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; Poison gas caused the lungs If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood to fill with froth and literally Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, choked victims to death. Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Cud: Literally, food that is Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— regurgitated from the My friend, you would not tell with such high zest stomach to be re-chewed. To children ardent for some desperate glory, Dulce et decorum est Pro The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est patria mori: Latin for “It is Pro patria mori. sweet and right to die for your country”; these Latin lines come from an ode by the Roman poet Horace (65–8 b.c.) that was well known to most educated Englishmen.

What happened next . . . For many of the poets who fought in World War I there was no next. Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, and Wilfred Owen all died in the war, ending their brief careers as poets. Others spent the rest of their lives reliving and recounting their war experiences. Poetry, of course, went on, but it was changed for- ever by the war. The war killed millions of men, but it also killed off the kind of poetry that could urge men to die for honor and glory and love of country. Future poets would never again uncritically accept the romantic notions of warfare that existed before World War I. The great poetic works that came out after the war—especially T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantos —all shared the ironic attitude displayed by Owen and Sassoon. (Irony is the use of words and images to convey something different from their literal meaning. For example, these poets often used beautiful poetic language to describe the demeaning effects of war.) Postwar literature of all sorts is filled with images of people who are alienated from grand ideas, lied to by bureaucracies, and who retreat into a shell of self-protection. The war novels of Erich Maria Remar- que and Ernest Hemingway share in this sense of alienation and disillusionment (see the following excerpts from these novelists).

128 World War I: Primary Sources Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)

One of the most significant of the war poets, Siegfried Sassoon was also one of the few who survived the war. Sassoon was born on September 8, 1886, to a family steeped in the literary and artistic culture of late nineteenth-century England. He acquired a gentleman’s education and pursued the interests of a wealthy Englishman: poetry and foxhunting. His first collections of poetry, published between 1906 and 1916, were considered bland and uninteresting. But his activities in World War I soon shook this refined gentleman to his core and brought vitality to his writing. Siegfried Sassoon. (Corbis Corporation. Reproduced Sassoon served as an officer in the by permission.) Royal Welch Fusiliers, a British army regiment, and quickly earned a Military Cross (war medal) for valor in battle. But Scotland. At the hospital, Sassoon met Sassoon saw more clearly than others the fellow poet Wilfred Owen; the two poets horror of war and the futility encouraged each other and wrote some of (hopelessness) of sending men into battles their best poems in the hospital. Sassoon’s that meant certain slaughter. He published poems address the horror and futility of his first collection of war poems, titled The war with a directness and an intensity rare Old Huntsman, in 1917. Soon after, he in war poetry. wrote a letter condemning the British army Sassoon survived the war and leadership. He could have been court- went on to create other works of real martialed (prosecuted) for the letter, but distinction. His trilogy of autobiographical he was instead diagnosed with shell shock novels, Memoirs of George Sherston, is (a term indicating that a soldier was so considered one of the best accounts of the mentally distraught from fighting that he war. Sassoon also became actively could no longer serve) and sent to the engaged in politics, especially antiwar Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, politics. He died on September 1, 1967.

Literature of the Great War: Poetry of World War I 129 Did you know . . . • Of the four poets represented here, three died in the war: Alan Seeger, Wilfred Owen, and Rupert Brooke. Does knowing this change the way you understand their poetry? •Wilfred Owen was killed just a week before the war ended. Literary scholars believe that he was one of the greatest of the war poets. • Alan Seeger fought not with the American army but rather with the French foreign legion, a select fighting force made up of volunteers from all over the world.

For More Information Books Brooke, Rupert. Rupert Brooke: The Collected Poems. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Lehmann, John. The English Poets of the First World War. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Owen, Wilfred. War Poems and Others. Edited by Dominic Hibberd. Lon- don: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

Roberts, David, ed. Minds at War: The Poetry and Experience of the First World War. London: Saxon Books, 1996.

Roberts, David, ed. Out in the Dark: Poetry of the First World War in Context and with Basic Notes. London: Saxon Books, 1998.

Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems. New York: Viking Press, 1949.

Seeger, Alan. Poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916.

Silkin, Jon, ed. Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. 2d ed. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Williams, Merryn. Wilfred Owen. Mid Clamorgan, United Kingdom: Seren Books, 1993.

Web sites Introduction to First World War Poetry. [Online] http://info.ox.ac.uk/ jtap/tutorials/intro (accessed January 2001).

“World War I.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook. [Online] http://www. fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook38.html (accessed January 2001).

130 World War I: Primary Sources